Romana Huk’s lecture, held on November 10, 2017, drew from a lengthy chapter on David Jones in her then-current book project. In it, she re-read the implications of this major modernist’s “theopoetics” and raised questions about how scholars in the rapidly developing field of religion and literature had been approaching his work. A survivor of the Battle of the Somme and, like many after the Great War, a Catholic convert, Jones has been read both as an apologist for his new faith and as the most radically experimental of the First World War poets, though few commentators have linked these potentially divisive aspects of his work. Professor Huk, who had written about avant-garde British poetry for more than a quarter century and who also edited the journal Religion & Literature, sought to draw out the complex poet’s innovative religious thinking through his art, as well as through his surprising argument about what happened in “the Cenacle” in his longest and most challenging essay, “Art and Sacrament.”
